Lisa's Laws: Tapping into Mom's fear of the bridge to Westchester

I'll also miss Playland, on account of the Dragon Coaster, and Miller's Toys in Mamaroneck, on account of its really cool stuffed animals.

White Plains, definitely. I always liked the big fancy mall there, and Bloomingdale's, which, as a kid, I loved going to with my mom. Our other favorite was Gimbels, but it has been gone for years, and I've been meaning to take my Bella to Bloomingdale's — there was always a restaurant there, and I wanted to see if they still served these huge frozen yogurt sundaes.

And just really too bad that all those great places are on the other side of the Tappan Zee Bridge.

All that aside, this is really a story about my mom, and how on many occasions she has been right about things. She was right about dating musicians and never cutting your own hair and that having a kid would be a lot of fun. More than anything, though, she has been proven right about the Tap.

My mom, as far as I can tell, is afraid of only two things. The first thing is snakes. She used to be afraid of worms, too, but she really likes to garden, so she forced herself to get over the worm thing. So now it's just snakes, and if you stay out of the Amazon and the reptile house at the Bronx Zoo you can pretty much avoid snakes altogether.

The other thing is the Tappan Zee Bridge.

As a kid, I found her fear of the bridge unreasonable. Of course, as a kid I found many things to be unreasonable, including, but not limited to:

--- The fact that school started so early.

-- That the McDonald's Shamrock Shake was only available around St. Patrick's Day.

-- That boys could be altar boys and get extra time off from the aforementioned too-early school day to do altar boy stuff, but girls couldn't.

-- That my brother had a larger room, even though he was younger.

-- And that even if there was only a little bit of snow on the ground, I had to wear snow boots and, if there was more than a little, these crazy snow pants that I never see on kids these days. (Although, looking back, I do realize that my mom was really looking out for me.)

Anyway, my mom's fear of the Tappan Zee was real, and though she didn't have any evidence to back her up, she was convinced that the thing could fall into the Hudson at any given moment, and that's why whenever she drove over it none of us were allowed to speak. She needed silence in order to get us across alive. She also needed to open all the windows in her 1973 VW Beetle because if she didn't, high winds on the three-mile span would blow us right over the side, which on any other bridge wouldn't be all that bad, since Beetles, everyone knows, float. But the Tap was so terrifyingly high that if you blew off, the crash into the water below would probably kill you.

Turns out, my mom, though a bit ahead of her time, was on to something. The bridge, we have all learned, needs a bit of, ummm, work — as in we need a new bridge.

Although maybe I'll cross the old Tap one more time. The Dragon Coaster is worth the risk.